Royalist terror in the fields

13052012

Here’s this week’s Sunday post. Often these Sunday posts have been humorous, but this week it is a sad joke post.

In our previous post we commented on the mainstream media as complicit in lese majeste. We said that for too long, the media has been supinely hopeless on the monarchy. The lazy scribbling that passes for “journalism” in the mainstream media has been an orgy of self-censorship on critical stories while dishing out palace propaganda and royalist twaddle as “stories.”

And so it is that the Bangkok Post works with the Royal Household Bureau to come up with yet another piece of palace propaganda. They present a kind of royalist horror story: a “paddy field in Ayutthaya where His Majesty the King harvested rice 16 years ago no longer bears any semblance of this celebrated moment.”

It is claimed that the “authorities have not preserved the field where His Majesty harvested the rice.” There’s no “physical structure explaining the significance of the place remains in the area…”. Maybe the officials will be flogged for this transgression or transferred to an inactive post or both?

This is beginning to sound like a new lese majeste case in the making. And, if the article’s picture is considered, it is clear that something very anti-royal is taking place. Horror of horrors, the owner of the land seems have leased it out to some poor fellow who is using it to grow rice! But it gets even worse!

From the Bangkok Post

The story tells readers that “ownership of the field has changed hands many times and the road sign leading to the historic field decayed and was eventually removed.”

That should strike terror in the hearts of monarchists and we imagine that Tul Sitthisomwong will have to get his ultra-royalist mob up there to demand that action be taken to rectify this very worrying situation.

Of course, this story doesn’t simply appear from thin air. Rather, the Post is working for the Royal Household Bureau that wants the field, now considered “historic paddy field.” The articles are part of the shaming of the owner mentioned above:

The bureau planned to buy the 10-rai plot to construct a memorial dedicated to the King’s contributions to Thai farmers. However, there has been no progress in the land’s acquisition.

As the king and queen are said to be heading there, “no progress” is a potential bureaucratic disaster.

As has happened many times , we could guess that the owner will be shamed into “donating” the land. Premier Yingluck Shinawatra will then be pressured into graciously allocating millions in taxpayers’ funds to create and then maintain the appropriate memorial to the king and his 1996 visit. It will be just one more memorial amongst tens of thousands to royal greatness.